Batman Cake

Last weekend I made my first fondant covered character cake for my nephews 6th birthday. I have been promising him this for ages, every time I spoke to him he wanted a different cake. He started out with a Pterodactyl cake which I was slightly nervous about! He then settled on Batman, which I hoped would be a bit easier.


I did a bit of research online to see what other batman cakes were around and decided on a round cake surrounded by a skyline with the batman sign projected on top.


I'm sure none of my decoration methods were particularly professional, I went for the "make it up as you go along" method which consisted of some print outs and clear plastic to make stencils and toothpicks to mark out my design.


For my first attempt, I have to say I was pretty pleased with myself. It did take many evenings of work but turned out pretty well.


I had to roll the blue icing out 3 times because it kept sticking at the last moment. Any tips to stop the fondant sticking to your surface? I covered my counter in icing sugar and kept moving the icing around but it still stuck.


The black icing made me nervous because the colour seems to run easily and I didn't want my blue icing to get stained. Cue, doing everything slowly and a lot of talking to the icing - yes I do that!

I made a French savoy sponge from my new "The art of french baking book". Correct me if I'm wrong but I think this is also called an Angel cake. The sponge has no butter in it (I figured with all the Fondant icing I should try to take out some fat!) and is made by separating eggs. I found the sponge light and dense, okay that makes no sense but it was delicious and...... spongey.


I made two 8in round cakes and sandwiched them together with sugar free strawberry jam. I didn't hand make it as usual just to save some time. I like smooth sugar free jams best.


I covered it in vanilla buttercream, made with vanilla bean paste which made it super yummy. The first layer was the crumb coat, nice and thin, I then popped it in the fridge overnight.

I smoothed out the cake with more buttercream the next day. I could have spent hours doing this, it never seems to be as smooth as you want it but I had to crack on.

Next I rolled out the blue fondant. I bought white fondant icing and massaged blue food colouring in to it a few nights before, a nice tv watching task. I had to use far more food colouring than I had anticipated and I had originally wanted the blue to be darker but, quite frankly, I got bored. I brushed the cake with water to make the buttercream sticky in preparation for the fondant.

I covered the cake and it was tense. As you can see I didn't get the icing flush to the bottom as I was too scared I would cut away too much. I knew I was going to cover it with black icing so I wasn't worried that much.

Next I added the skyline. I just did this to eye so no fancy tricks to share. I marked the windows with little L shapes using the end of a knife.

I made the back of the batman sign by tracing the image on to a piece of clear plastic and cutting around it. I then marked the bat by poking holes through a paper print out to give the outline on the fondant which I then cut around. You can see tiny holes on the edge of the bat so I will have to work on that!

Again I made the projection bit by eye and stuck it on by brushing it with water. I stuck on some yellow windows with the left over yellow and finished with a few white chocolate stars.

I had both my niece and nephew stay for the weekend. As I had missed their birthday's because I was in Japan we decided that the Friday would be Tom's "birthday" and Saturday would be Anya's. We went for a quick dinner to Nandos on the friday then finished off with the cake. The little man seemed to appreciate it! Every few hours he would run over the the cake and say "Can I see the Bat? Don't touch it!". It took me a while to persuade him that we could cut in to it and eat it!

Happy baking. Cake fairy x

Rainbow Cake

Two words.

Rainbow. 

Cake. 

Two more words. 

Super. Exciting.

I made this cake for Charlotte's birthday and It was requested a while a go.

I used this vanilla cake recipe although I would recommend, if you want to make this cake, that you don't choose a combination cake recipe (where you fold in whisked egg whites at the end) as you have to mix the food colourings in quite a bit and you loose the air from the egg whites. I had the rather tricky job of measuring out all batter before the eggs then weighing the eggs so I got an even amount in each bowl. 

School girl error.

Soooooo this cake is actually not that difficult, although looks impressive so pretend to your friends it was. 

1. Weigh your mixing bowl and make a note of the weight.
2. Make your vanilla cake batter.
3. Weigh the bowl with the batter. Minus the bowl weight to get the weight of your batter.
4. Divide this by six.
5. Measure each portion into your six bowls.
6. Remember the rainbow - Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue and, for this purpose, Purple)
6. Mix in lots of food colouring - the brighter the better!
7. Grease and line two 8in round tins with baking paper.
8. In one tin pour in the batters, in the middle of the tin, one at a time, in the following order:

Red

Orange

Yellow

9. In the second tin do the same in this order:

Green

Blue

Purple

10. Bake for however long the recipe states, then remove from the oven and leave to cool.

Meanwhile.......

Make the icing.

Pomegranate and Lemon buttercream

230g butter
250g icing sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 drop pomegranate oil
pinch of salt
Colouring (I used claret gel colour - gel is best as it doesn't change the consistency of the icing too much)

1. Cream butter and sugar together.
2. Stir in lemon juice, oil and salt
3. Whisk with an electric whisk for 5 mins until deliciously fluffy

Note: Usually I wouldn't use something as difficult to find as flavoured oil, but they really are great, you only need the smallest amount for an explosion of flavour.

Assembling

1. Put one cake on a flat surface and cut off the dome to make the cake flat. The best way to do this is to hold a serrated knife parallel to the cake where you would like to cut. Hold it firmly. Put pressure on the knife and rotate the cake in to it. Do this to both cakes.

Here is a useful video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH-kMcdmqB8

2. Turn your first cake over so the perfectly flat part is on the top. Cover the top with icing and sandwich the other cake on top. Cover the whole cake with a thin layer of icing and put in the fridge for as long as possible, min 40 minutes.
3. Take the cake out of the fridge and cover in buttercream. By putting the cake in the fridge with a thin layer of buttercream you are making sure you stop the crumbs of the cake making your buttercream ugly.

Anyway if I haven't explained that well just search it on youtube, there are some great videos on how to layer cakes.

Happy Rainbows.